Republicans ask Pennsylvania court to delay ruling on mail-in ballot envelope rules | News, sports, jobs
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Republicans ask Pennsylvania court to delay ruling on mail-in ballot envelope rules | News, sports, jobs

FILE – Allegheny County Election Division Deputy Manager Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at the polling station in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

HARRISBURG, PA. (AP) — Republicans wasted no time in appealing a court ruling in Pennsylvania that would loosen rules on mail-in voting, asking the state’s highest court Thursday to reverse a lower court opinion issued a day earlier.

The state and national GOP filed an emergency request that the justices wait for a Commonwealth Court ruling that envelopes voters use to mail in ballots do not have to be properly hand-dated, as required by state law.

The Republican groups said that if the Supreme Court does not overturn the decision, it should at least amend it to say it is not in effect for the vote that ends on Tuesday.

The Commonwealth Court, in a 3-2 decision, said 69 mail-in ballots that were missing dates or had incorrect dates should be counted in two special elections for the Philadelphia state House of Representatives held in September.

The judges emphasized that they were ruling on an election that has already occurred — involving unopposed candidates — but there is uncertainty about how that might apply to the current election. Pennsylvania is the biggest swing state in the close presidential election, and its voters also fill one U.S. Senate seat, three statewide offices and most of the Legislature.

Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting rules have been frequently contested in state and federal courts since absentee and mail-in voting was allowed for all registered voters by the 2019 Legislature, shortly before the pandemic. In March, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement of an accurate, handwritten date was enforceable, and in April, the state redid the envelopes to make it harder for voters to make dating mistakes. The state Supreme Court last month rejected an attempt to throw out the dating requirement and said on Oct. 5 that it would not revisit the issue.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that the decision came too close to Election Day, county election boards should have weighed in, and the state Supreme Court recently ruled the other way on the same topic.

“Therefore, absent this court’s intervention, county boards will likely count undated ballots that the General Assembly has said cannot be counted.” they wrote in the report made last Thursday. They cautioned that the uniform date requirement could be applied differently across the state.

“There is no excuse — none — for the majority rushing to overturn the General Assembly’s date requirement less than a week before the 2024 general election,” they wrote in the emergency application for extraordinary relief.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave other parties until early Friday to respond.

In two decisions in the past two months, the state Supreme Court left the outer envelope date mandate in place, indicating that the Supreme Court did not want existing laws or procedures to change in any significant way “during the time of an election in progress.”

The Commonwealth Court majority said that requiring exact dates on outer envelopes, which are not needed to determine whether a ballot has arrived on time, violates the state’s constitutional provision that elections must be free and equal and no civil or military power can interfere with them “free exercise of the right to vote.”